Old World Evolution Nerfed - All mobs in TBL Enabled?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Smokezz, Mar 13, 2019.

  1. Stephen51 Augur



    Thanks for the reply.

    Shame about old world evolution nerf, I had a nice little hideaway in the Keepers Tower in Argin Hiz. Had the spiders and golems been included, I could have had a nice distraction in the mines! Ah well back to getting seven shades kicked out of me in TBL :)
  2. Ngreth Thergn Developer

    yeah. Not sure what I was thinking. Snails are cute?
    It came about in a design meeting. I didn't write down our reasoning. As for the change without communication... things happen :/ we are not perfect.
    As for Doomfire. I can see if we can change the instances, but I cannot guarantee it. There may be some technical issues.
    I'll think about adding 18s, but I'm not very convinced here. I'm more likely to reduce the rarity.
    As for all TBL augs. No. For that, I am unconvinceable at this time.
    Ornaments. Maybe.
    Absolutely false in a per kill nature except in perception. The ONLY advantage is the speed of kill. There is LESS exp per kill. The advantage to the old content is the speed and ease of killing.

    For example. As a solo, there is literally more than 5x exp per kill for a white con that there is for a light blue con. AND even a full group of 6 gets twice the experience for a white con than a solo gets for a light blue con. The same 5x difference in a full group applies to a light blue con for a full group vs a white con for a full group.

    The entire difference is speed/ease of killing.

    I will consider, not promise, this idea. But not this patch.
  3. Cadira Augur

    I have two level 5 items and 2 more soon on deck. I'm a cleric, so no killing in old world zones. I even had a lot of achievements to complete before I started leveling every single one.

    I think they are perfect in time required, and am even somewhat against the change they made so you can level them all up at once. If you can't get the groups together to level them up in a timely manner than you simply aren't putting in the work required for a bis item and don't deserve it. I mean no offense from this, just a fact.
  4. Sancus Augur

    I think reducing the rarity would also help alleviate the issues a bit. That said, there are three main advantages of having them on a vendor: it allows people to target the augs they want, it provides a way to earn consistent progress towards an aug, and the currency reward is non-rivalrous.

    To expand on the first and second points, I completed TBL Hunter on January 2nd, 2019. I spent a lot of that time re-killing named for other people's hunters, and I've done many additional named-farming groups since that point. I think I've invested at least 200 hours into solely camping TBL named at this point, and probably killed around that many named. In that time, I've seen the following Whispering Midnight augs: Whispering Midnight Defending Fire, Whispering Midnight Warding Fire, Whispering Midnight Attacker, and Whispering Midnight Ventral Defense.

    The issue with the above is I'm a Magician. I'm never personally tanking, so Defending Fire is useless for me. My melee damage is insignificant, so slightly more Accuracy is similarly useless. Ventral Defense is also not really worth it because I'm not tanking, and the effect doesn't stack with Blazing Euphoria Ventral Defense. In those three cases I passed to other people in the group or found guildmates that could use them. Warding Fire I could've/would've used, but I lost the roll as pretty much everyone could/would use it.

    To some extent I've had bad RNG, but right now there are 16 different Whispering augs that could possibly drop. There's no way, at least that players have figured out, to target a particular aug. That, on top of the RNG of getting a drop in the first place, makes the time dedication to acquire the best augs extremely variable. If I were a tank, I'd have 2-3 solid augs from the above drops. Because I'm a caster, I'm exactly no closer to acquiring the Type 18's I want than I was the day I zoned into the expansion. I know casters who just happened to get all the Type 18's they wanted while doing Hunter. I don't think that degree of variability without any method of mitigating it creates a good reward structure. Instead, because of how probability with no bad luck protection works, unless you actually receive an aug during your grind you are exactly 0 expected hours closer to acquiring the ones you want than you were before.

    As far as currency being non-rivalrous, that means you can add people without diminishing/diluting the reward at all. I definitely have no issue with boxing, but the current design of this system heavily favors being able to kill quickly and funnel all the augs to one character. In real 6-person groups, you do kill somewhat faster than 6-box groups, but you have the additional RNG of rolling against multiple other people on the off chance an aug you want actually does drop. While there are some people with most of the augs that did it purely via grouping, most people I know with a decent set of Type 18's acquired them via boxing and looting all of them on their main. More power to them, but I think adding another option that allows for everyone in the group to work towards the reward would alleviate the disparity.

    And I feel compelled to say that I do understand that RNG is a core element of EverQuest and RPGs. I didn't mind some RNG parts of the evolving item system (e.g. acquiring the items themselves), nor do I mind an RNG element that still provides a reasonable rate of acquisition (e.g. Type 19's). There have been some rare drops in the past in EQ, but outside of the random rare-quality drops in past expansions, the vast majority of modern items are targettable (meaning item A drops from mob B) and don't have anything remotely close to the time commitment and variability of this particular system.
    Allayna, Jhenna_BB, Brohg and 7 others like this.
  5. Tolzol Augur

    This would be nice, if you were to do it i would set the cost extremely high to make them more rare than common still. Would encourage people to group and do missions more than just farming their type 5’s through them and then stopping. As long as the cost is high enough doing it this way will still keep people busy until next expansion/into next expansion depending on how hard they go. In this scenario you could leave them as rare as they are from named. Like Sancus said how the system is now you pretty much want to stay to yourself and/or stick with a certain group and farm named due to not wanting to lose out on a roll which isn’t to healthy.
    Ssdar likes this.
  6. Ngreth Thergn Developer


    I did a re-check of the data. The TBL Doomfire INSTANCES will count when I remove the NPC restrictions (Still not in the March Patch, so April) By instances I do mean the missions and the raid. The base zone will not count (since it is PoP SKU not TBL SKU)
    Jhenna_BB, Brohg, Thunderkiks and 4 others like this.
  7. Tucoh Augur

    I'm about done with TBL missions/hunter/collections/achievements and have found 1x Whispering Midnight aug (defending fire).

    Right now I'm just planning on my T5 using the secret dawn / weeping heaven augs in the type18 slots and not bothering with trying to get Whispering Midnight augs.


    What's funny is that Type 19 augs are relatively easy to get, so the evolving items really only become amazing after they are upgrading to tier5 and can use type19 augs.
  8. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Thank you, this will give us a reason to kill trash in PoFire missions instead if skipping as much as possible.

    If you are against putting 18/19 augs on a vendor can you please consider allowing us to trade them in for a different one, its frustrating when you get augs aimed at casters and no caster in the group to use it.
  9. kizant Augur

    There's just too many augs at once. It would have been nice to have a convert option. Like 8 groups of 2 where you can convert between something useful to a caster to something for a tank or something.
    Whitecloudx, Yinla, Sancus and 2 others like this.
  10. Syylke_EMarr Augur

    I don't know how difficult it would be to implement, but instead of dropping the specific augs, they could drop a clicky item that popped up a claim window to choose the aug you want (similar to a spell rune clicky). Something like that would alleviate so many issues with the type 18s.
    Ssdar and Sancus like this.
  11. Cailen Augur

    It would be awesome if the servers were brought down to implement this asap instead of having to wait for the April patch.
    Gabrieles likes this.
  12. Hickers Elder

    This very nicely sums up why I would prefer to see the type 18's added to the vendor as well.

    Assuming that a named will drop a type 18 aug 1 out of 10 times (certainly their rarity makes me feel that the drop rate is set around this number), and as we know there are 24 variations of type 18's, that gives you a 1 in 240 chance of getting the aug you want. No wonder some people, even with high play time, are nowhere near getting the augs they would like.
  13. Natal Augur

    The solution to the type 18 problem IMO is to have them as rare drops of trash (much like type 19 augs drop off raid trash). Something like a 0.1 - 0.5% chance (something in that range) of dropping would work I think. That would probably increase the amount coming into the game and would be in line with the ~10% drop rate off nameds in terms of work required to get them. Alternatively, have them as a 1% drop in mission chests (this would correspond roughly to the amount of time required to get a named spawned as opposed to doing missions).

    As far as the specific item is concerned, the augs should be non-specific items that can be combined in a tradeskilled item to make the 24 variations. So, you get a diminished muhbis style drop, which you combined in one of 24 different tradeskilled containers to get the final
  14. Cadira Augur

    Nice, so instead of flipping TT mission people can bring their ranger's into PoF mission and just HS everything to get all their items leveled up in no time. Isn't that kind of behavior what we were trying to fix/avoid in the first place?
    Allayna likes this.
  15. ~Mills~ Augur

    The problem is they don't see it as a problem. I have zero problem with all the work if it was like Artisans prize and permanent but people flipped their lids over having hunter aug, achievement aug, etc so now we essentially have the same things except eventually now they will not be BIS and all that effort evaporates unlike an aug that probably stayed forever.
  16. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    @Sancus

    As to not quote the long post again - Right on man, well said!
  17. Krazzi Elder

    I like the change, make it as hard as you want to level it up. /shrug, mine are tier 5. Also, should stop making them drop so often,i've had 22 drop already. They are suppose to be "ultra rare" and sometimes they drop 2 in the same instance.
  18. Allayna Augur

    The other type 18 solution I think that would be wonderful is to leave the rarity, but make the aug convert through every single type available.
    Yinla likes this.
  19. Tucoh Augur

    Sorry for being a bit thick, but can you please confirm:
    1. That you're making it so that all/most of the NPCs in GMM will give evolution XP to the TBL chase items.

    2. This change will happen in the April patch.
  20. ShadowMan Augur

    So does this mean TT will work again as of April patch or by will remove the restrictions do you mean all mob types in TBL will work as of April?